Bio-circuit advances toward programmed microbes

Just as electronic circuits are made from resistors, capacitors, and transistors, biological circuits can be made from genes and regulatory proteins.

Washington University in St. Louis engineer Tae Seok Moon’s dream is to design modular “genetic parts” that can be used to build logic controllers inside microbes that will program them to make fuel, clean up pollutants, or kill infectious bacteria or cancerous cells.

“We’re not trying to build a computer out of biological logic gates,” Moon says. “You can’t build a computer this way. Instead we’re trying to make controllers that will allow us to access all the things biological organisms do in simple, programmable ways.”